No Battle For Battlefield:Earth

NEW YORK (Variety) - With no rival offers, cable's Sci Fi Channel has quietly bought TV rights to the recent John Travolta flop ``Battlefield Earth,'' for a bargain $2 million.

The deal actually happened a few months ago, but it was kept hush-hush: Sci Fi felt sheepish about the buy, and the film's domestic distributor, Warner Bros., didn't want to rub Sci Fi's nose in it.

``Earth'' became notorious when Warner Bros. released it last year to almost universal pans. The critics treated it as a vanity production of Travolta, a practicing scientologist, who had always wanted to make a movie of the novel ``Battlefield Earth'' because the author is the late L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology.

Buoyed by Travolta's name and an ad campaign stressing the explosions and the futuristic special effects, ``Earth'' opened in theaters with a not-contemptible $11.5 million. But word of mouth sank it: Six weeks later, the movie had stopped tracking at $21.4 million.

Neither Warner Bros. nor Sci Fi would comment for the record, but Sci Fi has locked in a three-year license term to ``Battlefield Earth,'' to start in December 2002. Because there were no other offers for the movie, Sci Fi got it at a bargain rate of only about 10% of domestic box-office gross instead of the typical 14%-15%.

One wag said Warner Bros. might have attracted an offer from Comedy Central if the network were still running ``Mystery Science 3000,'' whose stock in trade was screening movies while three characters -- a scientist and two robots, the backs of their heads visible at the bottom of the screen -- delivered a constant stream of sarcastic remarks, skewering a movie that deserved to be skewered.